


after the end of the world

by punkrockbadger



Series: ram and kaavya's eight for eight [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Desi Potters, F/M, James and Lily are both South Indian because I said so, Only James Survives AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:17:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6003909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His wife is gone. His son is gone. All of his family who were in England are dead save for him, some mercifully of old age, and some, he thinks, at an age where death should have never crossed anyone’s minds. But his wife and son are gone nonetheless, and he wonders, deep down, if it was his hands that dealt the final blow, in some sick, twisted way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	after the end of the world

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! 
> 
> This fic marks the beginning of a big collaboration between myself and my friend Kaavya, in which we take my Tamilian James (Janardhan), shove him in with Kaavya's half-Tamilian Lily (Lalitha), and turn the suffering up to the max. We've got a lot more planned, and there'll be some funny bits in all the stories here and there, but this is mostly to establish our positions at the top of the Angst Writer Mountain. Be warned.
> 
> I'm sorry in advance, because I'm going to get my butt kicked by at least four different people for writing it, and I hope you enjoy the fic. Leave a comment at the end about what you think! :)
> 
> Oh, and by the way, Happy Valentine's Day.
> 
> -S
> 
> (PS: For my Tamil speaking folks-- listen to [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nORiUfQq-1Y) while reading for extra feelings!)

England has never exactly felt like home, to Janardhan Iyer.

There has always been something a little off about it, to him, most of all reflected in a name he doesn’t particularly enjoy using, tied so securely to this place that he feels like he can’t escape it. Even though he knows full well that he was born here, and should hold it closer to his heart, should speak of it with a fondness layered into his voice that could only come of respect for a homeland, he doesn’t, because it is not entirely his, just like James Potter is not entirely him. But now, he thinks, staring at the headstones of his wife and child, looming like Dementors over empty graves, there is no “exactly” about it anymore.

England cannot, will not, be home ever again.

James Potter may stay, but there is nothing left to keep Janardhan Iyer here, now.

His wife is gone. His son is gone. All of his family who were in England are dead save for him, some mercifully of old age, and some, he thinks, at an age where death should have never crossed anyone’s minds. But his wife and son are gone nonetheless, and he wonders, deep down, if it was his hands that dealt the final blow, in some sick, twisted way.

It was Peter who had set Voldemort on their trail, the same Peter he had trusted with his life all this time. The hands he’d held during midnight panic attacks had directed Voldemort to their house, the mouth he had loved to see curl into a hesitant smile had said the words that had damned Hari and Lalitha.

In the end, Janardhan muses, he really was trouble.

Lalitha had been right, about him, back when they were still schoolchildren, mostly untouched by what was to come. It was a pity, then, that she’d changed her mind.

Maybe, he thinks, she would still be alive somewhere, if she hadn’t. Maybe she would’ve married young still, had a son like Hari, except slightly less adorable. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, and would’ve finished up her training as a Healer, as she’d planned before their lives went to hell in a handbasket.

He can see her in his mind’s eye, dark red hair falling over her face as she frowns, committing every line of the papers she is reading to memory. She reaches up every few minutes, brushing hair out of her eyes, and he is content to watch, to love this hypothetical Lalitha, one who is still Lily Evans to him. He is content to love this version of her who never loved him, and to desperately hope that, somehow, he can go back in time and make her real.

Any wizard, no matter how well-intentioned, should never mess with time, he hears Albus Dumbledore say in his mind, careful and slow, and Janardhan clenches his fists, selfishly hoping that his nails will break the skin. Then, maybe, people will understand how much he hurting, if he has something physical to show for it.

He wasn’t home, when it happened.

He had left the house, and then he’d come back, and they were dead, walls collapsed and broken around them, and other than a raw throat from screaming, he hadn’t been hurt at all. He feels like he should’ve died alongside them, should’ve protected him like a good husband and father would, but he hadn’t, he’d failed them in this one, crucial moment, and now they were farther away than he could hope to reach in this lifetime.

And nobody understood the pain, or even understands it now.

Nobody understands what a struggle even waking up is, when even opening his eyes is burdened by the knowledge that he won’t see their faces, bright and smiling and eager to tackle the day ahead. Nobody understands his heavy heart, and the way it sinks into his shoes at even the sound of a baby’s laugh, at the sight of a father and his son, or worse, a mother and hers. Nobody understands it, and frankly, Janardhan is beginning to think nobody really cares, anymore. They would speak of them as if they were alive, at first, hash over the same memories that brought smiles to everyone’s faces around a dinner table, but even that had stopped, after the six month mark.

Everyone seems reluctant to remember them now, as if speaking of the dead too much will invite a similar misfortune into their own families, and Janardhan understands, because he wouldn’t have wanted someone like him, someone whose family had been destroyed by a split second of his absence, to stay around too long. It could be catching. And so, he’d let most of his friends fall away, let them find their new lives, after the war, and had tried not to mind when those new lives, little by little, stopped including him.

He’d learned to navigate the strange waters of being both a widower and father to a dead child at twenty-two with Sirius and Remus to help, in whatever ways they could, and had done his best to leave some spaces in his life for Lalitha and Hari, who had always deserved better from him. To be fair, they’d deserved better than him, but he was what they’d gotten, and they’d come off much worse for it.

At least, somehow, he had done right by them. It came a little too late to save them, but now Peter is in jail for life, and Sirius and Remus are safe and alive. Voldemort is dead, and there would be nothing more to worry about, now. He had done something worth doing, and although he still felt like he’d signed their death warrants with his own hands, had turned them over to Voldemort himself, he had helped it all come to a close.

Everyone else is breathing easier, Janardhan muses, a smirk painting its way across his face, but the people he most wants to, aren’t.

Hari would never age a day beyond fifteen months. And Janardhan would now be older than Lalitha forever.

It all feels deeply wrong, like it shouldn’t have happened at all, which is true. It shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have, Janardhan reminds himself, if he’d stayed home. If he’d stayed home, he could’ve stopped Voldemort as he came through the door, could’ve bought Lalitha time to run with Hari, could’ve ended it all right there, could’ve—

He could go on forever, but the fact of the matter is that he didn’t do any of those things, and that they would still be dead when he opened his eyes, no matter how many universes he dreamed up where they weren’t. And maybe he would’ve died, in saving them, and maybe that would’ve been horrible, although Janardhan is quite sure that Lalitha would’ve handled this much better than he has. She would’ve saved Hari, with even just seconds more time. She would’ve done right by their son.

And instead, thanks to him, that chance, along with their boy, is gone forever.

“I can’t say that I’ll come back.” He says quietly, only loud enough for them to hear. The emptiness that has plagued him since last Halloween intensifies, leaving him feeling like he is nothing more than a concrete shell. People forget, sometimes, that there were four deaths, that night, just because one of those bodies is still walking around, still eating and breathing and living, despite all odds.

He doesn’t know who the person he’s become is, but damn, does he feel empty.

There is a crushing wave of guilt, at the thought of leaving them behind, at leaving them in this godforsaken place without him, but this was home to them in a way it never was to Janardhan. They had lived happily here together, Hari as well, and he’d already abandoned them once, so it wouldn’t make much of a difference to them if he did again, would it?

He had already left them when it counted most, had left them to die in the wreckage of their home, had held the flaming stick to their funeral pyres himself, so leaving these empty graves, put up by some ignorant well-wisher to turn their horribly short lives into a tourist attraction, should be no problem, for someone like him. Some horrible monster of a husband and father, like him.

“I love you.” He says, tripping over the words. He is out of practice, not like when he would whisper the words in Hari’s ears as many times a day as he could, not like when he’d say it between kisses, to the sound of Lalitha’s laughter. The words don’t flow out of his mouth unimpeded like they used to, back in the day when he had people to love freely, and didn’t have loss sitting on his shoulders like Hari used to, growing like he never would. “Enna mannichudu, please…” (Forgive me, please.)

“I love you two so much, and—and—“ He rubs his fingers hard across his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut like that will halt the tears in their tracks. He swallows hard, taking a deep breath, before speaking again. “I can’t be here anymore. I can’t. This—this isn’t home for me, anymore, and I promise, I promise, this doesn’t mean I’m forgetting you. I’m never going to. Never.”

He aches with the weight of holding his grief in, holding back this ugly monster that’s blossomed in his chest, like he’s been doing for months. Yes, I’m married, he wants to say, when people he’s never met before ask him if he’s in a relationship. Yes, I’m married, and we have a beautiful little boy at home. He’s nearly twenty-seven months old now, and, wouldn’t you know it, he’s chattering on non-stop! He’ll only stop talking if I’m talking, and it’s driving my wife mad, poor thing.

But none of those things are true, and they have never been true, and it is driving Janardhan mad, picking him apart piece by piece so slowly and carefully that he hadn’t even realized he was losing himself until it was too far gone to fix.

“Irukka mudiyaathu, inga. I just… I just... I can’t be here anymore.” He says, and lays his head against Lalitha’s gravestone, the one that has Lily Evans carved across it in a final act of irony, memorializing someone who Janardhan had really only barely known. His Lalitha, his wife, is somewhere else. Somewhere better. She deserves a lot more than a gravestone with the wrong name on it, he thinks, but even in death, she is settling for less, just like she did with him.

Someone has laid a bouquet of fresh flowers against it, and he wonders if that is what they do here, to honor their dead. All he has, the only reminder that isn’t too painful, is a photo hanging on the wall of Lalitha and Hari laughing together, with a garland around it that he changes whenever the flowers look particularly sad. If one were to look close enough, they would see the edge of Janardhan's handwriting peeking through, just above the frame, the words “Lalithavum Hariyum (1981) -- en ulagame, en uyire” scrawled in Tamil across the bottom of the photo, the photo of Lalitha and Hari, his entire life, his entire world.

It is a good thing, these days, that the frame hides most of it. The “uyire” still peeks through, and he finds it awfully ironic that the one thing they don’t have, life itself, dares stares him right in the face like that.

He doesn’t want to think about that, so he imagines her warm lips pressed against his, imagines her smile, the memory fuzzy around the edges after too long without seeing it directed at him. He remembers how Hari would pout adorably at being excluded, the way he’d throw his arms around one of each of their legs, as if holding his parents together, until one of them picked him up. It has been almost a year, since he had had one of those hugs. The thought almost kills him, or feels like it, because he is still (disappointingly) alive, after it passes. “I miss you too much, and being here is just—it’s not right for me, and Sirius and Remus know it and I know it, and, god, I’ll miss you two so much, but I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t be here anymore. I’m so sorry, you deserve so much better.”

The tears start coming, pouring down his face despite his best efforts to stop them, and he gives up. Let them fall, he thinks. It is a lost cause, this battle, and maybe he will get to the point where he won’t have to fight it as intensely anymore, whether it happens through death or the weight on his shoulders lessening. He both yearns for and despises the idea of a day in which it stops hurting this intensely, a day on which hearing the name Hari yelled at a child won’t make him feel like his heart is being torn out of his chest and stomped on in front of him, a day on which he won’t wake up expecting to see Lalitha, asleep and drooling onto her pillow, beside him and be met, instead, with crushing disappointment and empty, still neatly folded sheets that smell like detergent and his sweat.

“I love you.” He forces out, in between sobs that make him feel like his chest is being cracked open, and it feels strangely final. The last words they will hear from him, for now, are the last words they heard from him while alive. He reminds himself, for a second, that they are everywhere, like his mother had said when his grandmother passed away. He was twelve then, and hardly knew anything of loss. He wishes he were twelve again, and could believe that.

“I love you, I love you, I love you.” He sobs. “Thaniyaa irukka mudiyaathu, thaniyaa irukka mudiyaathu.” (I can’t be alone, I can’t be alone.)

He doesn’t remember getting to his feet, or stumbling out of the cemetery, but he remembers shakily Apparating back to the apartment he’s lived in since the morning after Halloween, and unlocking the door with unsteady hands before locking it behind him and collapsing on the couch, the same ratty brown couch that he’s brought with him everywhere he’s lived since his parents let him take it from their house when he moved out.

It will stay behind, for the first time, during this next move.

He’s found himself a job back where he grew up—a small primary school in Thanjavur needs a Tamil speaking Transfiguration teacher worth their salt, and Janardhan Iyer, if anything, has always been a good teacher. He’s offered to fill a regular teaching spot as well, so he wouldn’t just be working in the evenings, so he is signed on to start teaching maths, filling the spot of a teacher who is going on maternity leave over Deepavali break.

And that job requires a move, and that move will be away from this life that he and Lalitha had so painstakingly put together, while discussing their plans for the future in hushed voices, hearts full and smiles bright. That, Janardhan thought bitterly, was back when they thought they were guaranteed a future. He had hoped that the next time he went back to India, it would be with his son in his arms and his wife at his side, and maybe they all would have gone to Tirupati together just like Janardhan's parents had taken him, at one year old, and shaved Hari’s head to help with that stupid debt Balaji was still paying off.

They would’ve been a little late to it, but it would’ve been just as good. Better late than never, his father had said, back when he was alive. But now, even late is out of reach, at least in its most positive senses. The only type of late Hari would ever have access to would be the one wedged uncomfortably in front of his name, whenever anyone spoke of him.

Janardhan shakes his head, sighing. He will give some money on Hari’s next birthday instead.

The Potter fortune, whatever of it is in England, will be divided when he dies, half going to charities for Muggleborn education and support that Janardhan has had earmarked since before graduating Hogwarts, and half being split between his nieces and nephews, if he has no more children of his own. He had only been persuaded to allow for future children after the goblins at Gringotts all but required it, but Janardhan is quite firm on that, in his mind—he had a son, and that son might not be breathing or here, but he’d gotten all the necessary things from his father, as it stood.

Hari doesn’t need money where he is, so it is no use leaving it sitting there, where it can help no one.

The Potter name, whatever that means, will die with Janardhan, and it is a good time to bring it all to a close, to cut off the ties keeping the name alive. Maybe, Janardhan thinks, this curse that must be upon them, to allow for this much death, is a sign that they shouldn’t have come to England at all—his cousin had passed, back when the war was nothing but a suspicion, and then his aunt, and then his uncle, and then his parents, and now Hari and Lalitha as well.

Maybe Bhagavan is sending a message that they were meant to have stayed home, where they belonged, all along.

It wouldn’t matter now, now that Janardhan is leaving all of this behind. Now that he’s going home, once and for all, and hopefully leaving this horrid curse here, to wither away for lack of targets. Sirius had been shocked, at first, at Janardhan's decision, but Remus had nodded sagely, a knowing look in his eyes. They had been quickly pacified with the knowledge that they could come visit whenever they liked, that they were still his brothers no matter the distance, like always, and that had been that. He’s due to leave early the next morning, using the first Portkey the Ministry would schedule, and all that had been left was to say that one, last goodbye.

“It’s a fresh start.” He says to himself, a flimsy half-smile coming to rest tentatively on his face, like a bird alighting upon a windowsill. “A new beginning.”

There is only one new beginning he wants, only one he needs, but it will not happen. He might as well make the best of this one.

In the picture frame that hangs on the wall across the room, Hari cuddles into Lalitha’s shoulder while she laughs, an endless loop repeating itself over and over, a bubble of time, caught and saved for all eternity.

Janardhan sits back up, taking a deep breath, before standing and walking over to his bedroom. Tomorrow is a big morning. He would do well to be ready.

* * *

No one has lived in Hari Thatha’s house since he passed away, early in Janardhan's fourth year of Hogwarts, but now the cousins have cleared it out for him, saying that maybe, living in the house where he grew up will do him some good. He remembers spending two years here as a child, while his father was hard at work tracking down the people who would one day murder his nephew, daughter-in-law, and only grandson, plodding off to the same school he would now be teaching at in the mornings, and running back home in the evenings to learn magic at his grandfather’s knee.

Now, seeing the name Hari just makes him a little nauseous, and he smiles his way through it, because it’s a common name. He knew that, when he gave it to his son. It’s just that every time someone says it, he remembers his son, who bore the name nobly and well for too little time, his little golden boy of a son who he’s gone and left behind. He would give anything, now, to hear his son complain about his name, to hear him say that it’s one he shares with too many people, and ask in the whiny, petulant voice he adopted whenever he wanted anything why he was named that.

But Janardhan will never hear that, and it is useless to imagine a future that just won’t happen.

He is glad, then, when he scans his roll call and finds that there is not a single Hari in his class. Bhagavan has done him this small kindness, at least. There is a Lalitha, though, and a lump rises in his throat that he bravely ignores. He remembers whispering the name into his wife’s ear in the mornings, remembers breathing it out between kisses and laughs and smiles. But the Lalitha sitting in front of him, a thin little girl with long, jet black, braided hair and dark brown eyes who looks just as nervous as he feels, is not the Lalitha he is missing. It is unfair to judge her based on something she cannot control.

Gryffindor courage, he thinks to himself, before shooting a soft smile at her to try and settle her nerves, and continuing forward through the list.

He falls into a routine, plodding off to school in the mornings and staying there until late, teaching all the Wizarding kids who stay behind after school about the wonders of Transfiguration, and they are all surprised by how much he makes it about art and drawings. He tells them it is mostly about imagining an object complexly, seeing it in three dimensions in their heads and changing it bit by bit with the help of their magic, and the kids laugh, but they try it, and largely succeed. He teaches them all the things he will never be able to teach his son, and they excel. The headmaster is impressed with his work, tells him the Transfiguration job is his for as long as he wants it, and he is glad to have something guaranteed, in life.

He passes temples and post offices and schools on his way home in the evenings, and smiles at the memory of charging down these streets beside his cousins, barefoot and yelling at the top of their lungs. He hopes, wherever his son is, that he is getting his fair chance at a childhood he’d been denied while alive.

Hari had spent all of his short life cooped up in Godric’s Hollow with his parents, the main source of his amusement going slowly up and down the stairs sideways, both hands clutching the railing as tightly as he could, until Sirius had gifted him the broomstick for his first (only, Janardhan's mind supplies) birthday. Janardhan hopes that Bhagavan (who has surely taken Hari into his embrace—his boy had come down and gone straight back to him too quickly for any further lives to be required) has given him somewhere good to run, somewhere he can roll in the grass and just live the life he’d been denied.

Hari deserves better than he’d gotten, Janardhan thinks fiercely, as he locks the door, checks the wards out of habit, and sits down on the swing for another night of marking papers as his feet slide back and forth against the red tile floor. It’s a good way to keep his mind off of the people that are missing, the two spaces on either side of him where two people would fit perfectly. Lalitha, with her head resting against his shoulder, smiling brightly, and Hari, laid out across their laps, or even insisting he could sit alone, without any help, little hand clutching Janardhan's as tightly as possible, as the swing rocks back and forth.

Instead of a wife and son, he has papers to grade, the papers of children who are at home now with their parents, smiling at their mothers and joking with their fathers, and he tries not to let that hurt as much as it does. The silence is oppressive, closing in on him like a narrowing tunnel, and he shakes his head violently, like that will clear the thoughts out of it. He has papers to grade. There is no time for dwelling, and he hates what happens when he does, anyway.

He returns them all as quickly as possible, to avoid thinking too much, and assigns new ones so he has no empty space to think in, spending any and all of his free time planning lessons down to the smallest detail. He laughs, one night, looking at his binder full of neatly written out lessons, remembers how Lalitha had her tutoring schedule written out just this neatly, back when they were seventh years and still innocently happy. Marriage really does make your spouse rub off on you, Janardhan thinks, laughing, and tries not to wonder how much more of herself she would’ve left to him if they had just one year more, or ten, or fifty, or eighty.

A couple months pass like this, in this torturous haze of not thinking, before he gets a letter. A familiar barn owl taps the bars on the window with a sharp claw, and Janardhan cries out “Hermes”, quickly walking over to the back door to let him through. There is a pot of garlic rasam, Lalitha’s old recipe, on the stove, and Janardhan casts a glance into the kitchen to make sure it isn’t boiling over before turning back to the owl, who is now sitting on the table, watching Janardhan expectantly. “What’s this?”

The envelope that Hermes had laid on the table clearly says “From your best friend, Sirius Black”, on the front in scrawled, intentionally messy handwriting, which Janardhan hopes is actually true, because he would hate to open a mail bomb when dinner’s about to be ready. Maybe he would eat first, just in case he died, so that he’d at least go on a full stomach.

“Poondu rasam makes you strong.” Lalitha used to say, when Hari used to cry about eating rasam sadham. “You won’t feel bad ever again.” Somehow, even garlic rasam hadn’t solved the problem Janardhan was currently wrestling with, which was the fact that his death was less a possibility and more an eventuality, and what was the point anyway, if that was the case?

It had bothered Sirius greatly, when Janardhan was still living in England, this casual acceptance of the inevitability of his own death. He’d called it dangerous, had told Janardhan to seek out help, but, in Janardhan's mind, there was no need to. He wasn’t doing anything dangerous, and that was when you sought out help, because that was when you needed it. It was nothing more than a thought flitting into his head, a small wondering winding its way through the space between his ears, and that wasn’t the sort of thing you needed help for. Janardhan could even hold them back sometimes, if he tried hard enough, but that left him feeling tired and heavy, like his bones had turned to lead.

He eats first, much more slowly than usual, setting some rasam sadham out for Hermes, who picks at it carefully, while wondering about whether to open the letter at all. He only belatedly wonders whether garlic is owl safe or not, but Hermes seems fine, so he keeps eating instead. He’ll send Sirius a replacement owl, if something happens. There’s bound to be an owl around here somewhere.

He ends up carefully tearing open the seal after washing his hands, pulling out a lined piece of paper obviously ripped from one of Remus’ Muggle notebooks. Even this reminds him of Lalitha, of the silly notes she used to pass to him in the backs of classrooms their last year at school, and he pushes down the flood of memories, ignores the reminder his mind pulls up that the Amortentia he’d had to make in seventh year Potions had smelled like Lalitha’s notebooks, in addition to the horrid stench of his dorm room and his mother’s anjalapotti.

This is Sirius and Remus, he reminds himself. Not Lalitha. They are still here, and need you to read this. He takes a deep breath, and follows his own advice.

“Dear Prongs”, it reads. “We miss you. It’s too quiet here. Remus is a horrid wingman, and that’s complicating everything in my life, at the moment. When would be good for a visit? Remus says to remind you that he loves you very much, and I would just like to make it clear that I love you more, no matter what that twit says about being your best friend. He’s not, is he? Who cares, anyway? I miss you, and hopefully I’ll see you soon! Love, Sirius.”

“Dear Sirius and Remus”, he writes back, a few days later. It takes him time, to want to reply, to feel the need to bridge this disconnect between his old life and this new one. He taps the end of his ballpoint pen against the side of his cheek as he thinks about what to write, what to say about his life here that they’ll understand.

He’d felt this way when writing back to them in the summers, back when they were schoolboys who knew nothing of loss, when Remus and Sirius (and Peter, his mind supplies, as he grits his teeth) were a continent away, too far to really remember in perfect detail. This seems to be a greater, more magnified version of that. The familiar feeling of not fitting is back, clawing at his insides, because no matter what he does, no matter where he is, he still has something tying him to somewhere else, something keeping him from just being, just belonging wherever he is.

“I have a break coming up in April, until June.” He writes, finally. “Feel free to come any time then. I miss you all too. It’s been too long.” He smiles fondly as he posts it back.

Maybe seeing them will help.

* * *

Sirius and Remus arrive, on a quiet afternoon in April, and they talk about everything and nothing at once. Janardhan is now newly twenty-three, and Sirius jokes that he is finally visibly aging beyond twelve, thank God. They laugh about old pranks and silly school day stories until someone slips, and “Lily” falls out of a mouth. Janardhan doesn’t know who it is that said it, or why, but the conversation changes after that, turns into something softer and more hesitant.

Lalitha has always had too large of an effect on him—he’s always been caught orbiting around her, pulled in by her gravitation, and that is true even in her death. She still exerts this incredible power over him, holds his life, his smiles and his happiness in the palm of her hand just like she did when alive. Even hearing someone else say her name is enough to send him into one of his silent funks, still, and he wonders if that is why he’s been trying his best to run away from it. She always seems to catch him, though, reel him back in no matter how far he runs.

“You alright?” Remus asks, frowning, and Janardhan nods shakily, casting a glance over at the picture. It has a new home now, just like him, sitting on the second shelf of a display case full of photos of family members who have passed on. Lalitha and Hari, still vibrant and bright and smiling, look out of place in the parade of black and white photos of hunched over old men leaning on canes and their stony faced wives, but that is their world now.

And this world is his, no matter how much it hurts to not be where they are.

“It’s alright. I just—It’s hard still, a little.” Janardhan says, heaving a deep sigh. It is still hard. He can settle into a routine all he wants, can run away all he wants, but the holes they leave in his heart come with him, wherever he goes. They are always with him, the pain always portable, and he doesn’t think he’d want to truly leave them behind, even if he could. He is starting to forgive himself, slowly and hesitantly, these days, for leaving their bodies behind, buried under English soil, and he thinks that’s what they would have wanted.

“That’s alright.” Remus says, smiling softly. He looks older than Janardhan remembers, sandy brown hair now shot through liberally with gray, and the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth are deeper than they used to be. Sirius is the same way, older than Janardhan remembers him, although his hair hasn’t grayed yet-- you can tell he’s been smiling, by the wrinkles around his mouth. It looks good on him. “We’ll talk about something else, if you need to.”

“Tell us about the brats you’re teaching.” Sirius cuts in, always one to save Janardhan from the weight of choices. He has always been indecisive, and Sirius has always known when to step in, when to hand him something to do rather than leaving him in charge. They truly are the Dream Team, even after all of this, and that thought still comforts him. No matter who he becomes, no matter how horrible he is, Sirius will always know him. “Gotta be at least one or two on our level.”

“There is, actually.” Janardhan laughs, thinking of little Shekhar, who can’t be more than eight, and enjoys tying girls’ braids to their chairs, among other, more destructive pursuits. He’s had a couple talks with that boy about leaving the other kids, as well as school property, alone, and thankfully, he’s starting to. “One time he smelled a chalk piece and it went right up his nose and got stuck there, just because he wanted to know if chalk smelled like anything. Can you believe it?”

Sirius laughs, loudly and heartily, and Remus joins in, and suddenly, it is like it used to be late at night in the Gryffindor boys’ dorms, when they all used to whisper back and forth and laugh when they couldn’t sleep. Janardhan feels at peace for the first time in a long time, hiding his smile with a loosely curled fist over his mouth.

After Sirius and Remus go to sleep, he sits out on the swing for a little while, staring at the wall as he drags his feet back and forth against the tiles, swing slowly rocking back and forth under him. He imagines Hari and Lalitha at his sides, like he does every time, and it hurts a little less than usual to imagine Hari, now very nearly three years old, chattering away beside him. Lalitha’s smile is blurry, in his head, but he is glad that it is still there.

Maybe, just maybe, things are starting to get better. He thinks that he could handle that.

* * *

It’s Cheenu Mama that brings it up, later that year. It is November, and the rains have started, and Janardhan smiles more and more often during his walks home, the smell of rain digging up happy memories of splashing around in puddles and playing tag until soaked to the skin. Maybe it was Janardhan's good mood that had brought up the subject, or maybe the fact that October has marked two full years since it had happened, or maybe it was something else entirely.

“Janardhan”, Cheenu Mama says, obviously angling to get something from him. Janardhan can hear it in his voice. Janardhan's father had never like Cheenu Mama when he was alive, had only played nice because he was his wife’s brother, and he and Janardhan would call Cheenu Mama “Pee Srinivasan” behind his back and laugh, when no one else was listening. And here P. Srinivasan is, Janardhan thinks, right on schedule, to pee all over his life. “Nokku oru ponnu paathirukkom…” (We’ve found a girl, for you.)

And that is all it takes.

Janardhan doesn’t remember what happens next, only that he quickly ushers his uncle out of the house and the doors are locked and wards are checked before he collapses against the door, sliding down it until he’s sitting slouched on the floor. What the fuck? What the fuck? Why would they—why would they think that he’s ready? Why would they think that he wants that?

“You’re dwelling on those who are long gone”, one of his paternal aunts writes him, early the next week. “They’re not coming back, and you’re lonely without a family. You have always been such a sweet boy, and you shouldn’t force yourself to be this lonely, not when there are other choices. Please try, for us. At least go see one girl.”

“At least one”, “at least one”, they all say, a rising chorus of voices that are too loud for him to handle, until he gives in, says “yes, fine, just one”, because it is far more simple than telling them no, considering nobody around here takes no at face value. His aunts rejoice, his uncles start passing his horoscope on to friends, and the news spreads like wildfire, much to his displeasure. It spreads so much, in fact, that his family actually finds someone interested, and drags him along to some girl’s house, after warning him incessantly for hours beforehand not to talk too much about his dead wife or child.

The girl is pretty. She is the kind of girl Janardhan would’ve wolf whistled at as a teenager, sitting with his mates on the walls of compounds, would have joked about and winked at, but now, there is nothing left of that Janardhan. Instead, he sits quietly across from her, eyes averted and sitting perfectly still, and doesn’t speak unless she speaks to him. If only I had been this well-behaved before, he thinks, then maybe Lalitha and I could have had more years together. But then, he thinks that, if he was more well-behaved, he wouldn’t have trailed around behind her like a lost puppy for that many years either. Maybe, she would be alive. He swallows hard, forcing the thoughts down, and offers the girl in front of him a way out.

She doesn’t want this either, that much is obvious from the way she’s sitting stiffly in her chair, and Janardhan tells her to go ahead, to tell her parents that he’s not a good person, and not the type she’d want to marry, and that he’ll act out if she doesn’t want to or can’t tell them. It is the only way to end this properly for both of them, and in such a way that his family won’t try looking again.

She stares at him quizzically, obviously wondering what his motives are, and he smiles, shaking his head, before standing up.

This ends here.

“They’ll tell everyone! We’ll never find another girl for you now!” One of his aunts hisses as they leave, and Janardhan is more than convinced that the only reason she’s not yelling is because he’s a grown man, and they’re all in public. He ignores the whispering in the back of the car on the ride back, gets down as quickly as he can once they stop at his house, and runs for safety.

He doesn’t want another girl. The only girl he wants is the one he lost, the one he couldn’t save, and there is no getting her back. He is fine alone, carrying her and their son in his heart, because he does have a family, still. He has a wife and a son, and even though people can’t see them, he can. Even though, most days, it feels like no one else still misses them, he does.

They are still here, and they still mean everything to him, and he’s not about to replace them in any way at all.

* * *

Every once in awhile, when the pressure from his family builds too high, he goes, meets a few girls and encourages them to dump him as hard as they can in front of their parents. Some of the girls find it funny, try to talk to him afterward, and he calmly lays things out, tells his sob story, and, after hearing it, they understand, most of the time, why he isn’t interested. Sometimes, they ask if he has pictures of them, ask what they were like, and he shows off his son and his wife, prideful smile wide on his face as he tells them how smart Hari was, and how brilliant Lalitha was with her Potions.

He ends up friends with one of the girls who asked to see pictures, close enough friends that they end up talking for hours and hours some nights. He meets her after work, some days, picking her up from her job at the local government office, and they just walk aimlessly around town, talking about how they both love the smell of rain, and how the best month of the year is obviously August. Savitri is bold and direct, just like Lalitha used to be, but there is a fragile kindness to it that reminds him of Hari. Their talks leave him feeling warm and fuzzy, smiling to himself as he kicks rocks into the sewers on the side of the road.

It is different from what he feels for Lalitha, which is still intense and fiery and all consuming after all of these years apart, in a significant way-- Savitri is a friend, possibly even a friend on the order of Sirius and Remus, but nothing more than that. They are both content to leave the relationship there, much to the horror of both of their families, who are convinced that they have no decency, and should either put an end to their friendship or do the right thing and get married.

They, as expected, do neither.

He meets her husband (“Raghuvaran, but don’t call me anything longer than Raghu, please”) before their wedding, gives him the shovel talk he’s given to all of his cousins’ spouses, and then, a few years later, he meets her son, who she names Murali, and has the sweetest brown eyes. Janardhan passes on baby care tips he remembers from Hari’s infancy, when she complains that Murali’s fussing, and passes on the baby books Lalitha used to keep as reference, when he meets the boy for the first time.

“I won’t be needing them.” He says quietly, smiling softly at her, before Raghu passes the boy to him. Savitri looks a little troubled, for a second, before he continues. “It’s alright. Really. Only thing I’m concerned about is that they might be a little out of date. You don’t have to keep them, if they are. Feel free to give them away or something.”

“Babies are babies.” Raghu says pragmatically, shrugging. Raghu reminds him a lot of Remus, Janardhan muses. They’re both so intensely practical that, sometimes, the most logical conclusion seems like the only one, to them. He imagines they would like each other, if they met, and resolves to introduce them the next time Sirius and Remus come by. Visits are hard to schedule these days, what with everyone’s schedules being impossible to coordinate, but the letters still come, and they are still just as warm and loving as always. Janardhan keeps them all in a drawer beside his bed, neatly ordered by date, and when the drawer gets too full, they go into shoeboxes, labeled by year, under the bed. “I’m sure they haven’t changed that much in the past ten years.”

Ten years. It doesn’t hit Janardhan until then that he is a father to a ten year old, that his son would be on his way to Hogwarts next school year. His son is ten. He would be one of the fifth standard boys that Janardhan is pretty much paid to hate for what feels like a million hours a day. He looks down at Murali, tiny infant body safely tucked into his arms as he sniffles and yawns, and wonders how Hari would’ve reacted to a younger sibling, if he’d had the chance. If any of them had had the chance.

From then on, every ten year old boy on the street becomes the source of questions, becomes a double take on Janardhan's part. Would Hari have inherited Janardhan's height? Or Lalitha’s? Would his eyes have stayed the same shade of green as they had been when Janardhan last saw them (eight and a half years ago, he still can’t believe it)? Would he still be hoarding the stuffed animals he’d had since childhood? Or would he be denying they were his? Would he have asked for a pet, like Janardhan had at that age? Or would he have just gone around collecting animals anyway, like Lalitha had?

Hari is a bank of possibilities, Janardhan thinks, and the hellish part of it is not knowing which, if any of them, would be true.

* * *

No letter arrives in June of 1991, because there is no almost eleven year old in Janardhan Iyer’s house.

There is no boy eagerly awaiting his letter, no mother worrying about her child leaving home for the first time. There is only a father without a son, a husband without a wife, only a man who divides his year into dreading July 31st, and then dreading October 31st, and then dreading January 30th.

No letter arrives in June of 1991.

A father sits on the swing in the front of his house in silence, waiting for his son to come home. There is an empty space beside him where his wife should be, and he grips the chain holding the swing up in his hand, imagining that his arm is around narrow shoulders. In truth, there is only empty air, and there is no son, and no wife. There is only him, left to mourn them for as long as he lives.

No letter arrives in June of 1991.

No letter was expected.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment below to yell at me, or come find me at [my tumblr](http://www.desiprongspotter.tumblr.com)!


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